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Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"
Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers
Uh, maybe if you're only looking at Windows and/or Office products. They also seem to do greatly, so why fix something that isn't broken?
But with some of their other divisions I wish they didn't change. Anyone else remember such from Microsoft Games as Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, Halo, Train Simulator, MechWarrior, Links, Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness.. Now that they changed they're not publishing or developing those kind of games anymore. In fact no one is. Microsoft Games is just for Xbox 360 anymore.
"Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come."
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
God, I just lost 40 IQ points reading the garbage summary. Can you be any more biased?
It is a hardware company vs. a software company.
Maybe 20 years ago they competed but that is no longer the case.
Nothing bias against either side but Apple's main focus is gadgets while Microsoft's main focus is software. Yes, Apple makes software and yes Microsoft makes hardware but neither are their main focuses.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Something that is vital to Apple overtaking Microsoft is a shift in attitude of the "zealous Apple consumer". Most folks that use Apple products are fine, but holy jeebus do Apple zealots piss me off. We get it, your brand of choice is shiny and pretty. Shut up about it.
Again, I know this only applies to a small portion of the Apple userbase, but that small portion is unbelievably annoying.
The usual "this is only my opinion" disclaimer applies.
Living With a Nerd
There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.
While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.
Microsoft has been consistently successful - in and of itself, that makes it hard to "leave the past behind". Over the same period, Apple made a slew of really bad decisions which brought the company pretty much into irrelevance by the mid-1990s. For Apple, leaving the past behind was an asset - Apple basically had to make itself over just to survive. That's served Apple well this decade, but let's not forget where they were (compared to Microsoft) previously.
#DeleteChrome
Could not be more obnoxious sounding. Only hipsters love hipsters because they often don't see how truly annoying they are.
Market capitalization is essentially meaningless as a measure of a company's strength, i.e. it's ability to continue operations while also facilitating growth in a competitive environment.
All that market capitalization ever tells you is what some fool would pay to acquire the company whole at the current market price quotation.
It doesn't reflect what one should pay.
It doesn't reflect what the book value of the company is (Assets minus liabilities minus intangibles).
It doesn't reflect what the intrinsic value of the company is (book value plus discounted operating cash flows forward - i.e. a measure of its effectiveness as a cash generating engine).
It doesn't tell you anything about product presence, sales, operating income, debt load, or any other metric that has anything to do with the actual "strength" of a company.
Journalists need to stop referencing "market cap" as if it bears greater meaning than "The (typically) overinflated price only a sucker would pay."
Market capitalization has nothing to do with the size or quality of an organization. It has to do with how much investors are willing to pay for a share of stock. It's a completely and totally arbitrary figure, as anybody who lived through the dot-bomb days should thoroughly understand by now.
I don't respond to AC's.
This comment will probably go down in flames, but it seems like this article is just an excuse to brown nose Steve Jobs. Apple makes fad devices; pretty nice devices but they are still playing to a fad (just take a look at their stock price). Microsoft, on the other hand, makes business computing possible on over 90% of the world's computers.
If you want an analogy here goes. Apple may be the hip guy who shaved his head to hide his middle aged bald spot, and hangs out with trendy friends. However, Microsoft is driving the minivan around because he actually has shit to get done while Apple is living off a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Talk about bias.
Love or hate Apple its more than mere marketing hype. Instead of being the end all and be all for everyone, they focus on very specific groups and very specific features that suit the small chosen area well. Of course for us that want more from our hardware we are screaming for more but for that catered group its often a perfect fit.
Apple is making the transition from a computer company to an appliance company. Expect more and more companies to starting do this as the industry starts moving to more focused products and unfortunetaly that also means controlled content.
Not really. Small companies and academic research departments come up with good ideas, Apple implements them well, and Microsoft implements them badly. Somewhat depressingly, quite a few of these good ideas come from MS Research, yet good implementations of them never seem to make it into shipping MS products.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.
On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.
Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.
So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.
. Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards, they don't need to innovate, they just have to make sure that the locks are still firm. A good indication of the beginning of the end is that it is starting to get lucrative for companies to break out of the Microsoft prison. Apple is doing the right thing, they keep their products simple, they don't try to appeal to every human crawling the face of the earth, and they emphasize on products that actually *work*.
Hold the fuck on. Are you really suggestion that Apple is less restrictive than Microsoft? Seriously?
Oh yeah, I forgot... the App Store and iTunes are the pinnacles of consumer empowerment. I mean, it doesn't get much better than having to hack your device so you can use non-Apple approved programs, or having your music player wipe itself completely because you hooked it up to a different computer.
Yup. Apple really knows how to let people use their purchases freely. ::golf clap::
Living With a Nerd
anybody remember IBM? Remember how anybody predicted IBM would die, go bancrupt or beocme irrelevant? Good. Big companies have the tendency to sometimes have weak phases and then - if they realize what is going on - strong phases.
It's all hype eh?
Ok, show me a video editing suite with 3/4 the ease and power as final cut pro suite for windows and I'll switch.
I've tried EVERYTHING under windows, and none of it can hold a candle to the workflow and speed of quality production as the FCP suite. Even AVID. I'd utterly kill for something that was 1/2 as effective as FCP for linux. but sadly nothing exists except toys that crash all the time or are for making really low quality home movies.
I'm not a fanboi, I am cringing hard at the though of having to spend $3500.00 on a new PC to be able to buy the current update to FCP. My Quad core G5 still works great, but I see the need to upgrade in the next year in order to maintain a speedy render time and workflow. and I cant build a hackintosh that will run stable as a rock to save my life....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
WTF does what the market think of a company's stock have to do with the real world?
It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.
Apple's market cap is driven by the same hip image as their hardware. Now, I like Apple products. They are executing extremely well, and delivering high quality, market leading products in their niches. But this is already part of their stock price, and then some. Apple has a 50% higher P/E than Microsoft, and that is a bit much.
Tell me in which universe was Microsoft ever "hip"? Young, yes of course, in chronology; but I don't ever recall them being anywhere near "cool."
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
No, no, no, they are just marketing hype. The focus you talk about is a marketing hype to make people who buy their products don't feel as stupid.
Oblivion Awaits
MS has primarily been a software company as far as PCs go. Users wind up buying primarily a hardware system, that typically has MS on it.
Apple does not make hardware, it merely creates hardware specifications that are manufactured in Chinese factories just like they are for PCs. The only real difference between OS X and Windows is that OS X is designed to work only on a much more limited range of hardware than does Windows.
MS winds up being limited by the innovation of its "partners". Apple has profited from being vertically integrated making both hardware & software.
Once again, an empty meaningless statement typical of the Apple fanboi...
The PC is itself a limited specification platform but Windows is theoretically designed to work on any PC provided that the hardware creators create drivers in the format that Microsoft expects to see for Windows. If anything, the evolution of that hardware, and the drivers for that hardware, allow Microsoft to create new Windows iterations that can take advantage of that hardware - surely therefore that is just the *opposite* of being limited by innovation of hardware partners?
Question: Does Ballmer have a strategy to break out of the partner limitations?
Why should he care? His company's OS runs on at least 90% of the world's desktops with no sign that's going to change any time soon.
As software and programming become more routine, will Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba and others finally pick open source?
Sorry, this statement makes no sense whatsoever. If programming is becoming *more* routine, then surely that's because of both free Open Source developer tools as well as those made available by Microsoft - so if anything it strengthens the position of both of those, whereas Apple deliberately controls very tightly what can be developed on its platforms and marketed through its Apple Store.
And, yes, as an Open Source and Linux user, I'd love to see Dell, HP, Sony, etc. picking more Open Source but as a pragmatist, I don't see that happening any time soon. However, that's not the core issue anyway since Open Source can take care of itself, provided the hardware manufacturers publish open specifications that allow the Open Source community to develop their own drivers for that hardware.
Warren Buffett once said in an answer to a reporter's question, that he wouldn't invest in MS because he couldn't see the long term investment strategy of basing a business on PC software. That seems to be an indication of a conundrum for MS./
This is a moot point since I know of nowhere where Warren Buffett has said he *would* invest in Apple either.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.